High Fashion You Can Eat After Wearing [Video]

Except you, models.

If you've ever wondered what you'd get if you crossed Project Runway and Top Chef (and what reality-show freak hasn't?), then look no further than Emily Crane's Micro-Nutrient Couture: High fashion you can eat.

Crane, a recent fashion school grad in the UK, creates gorgeous, sculptural garments using ingredients you could find in any old kitchen from food coloring and lusters to agar agar sea vegetables and kappa carrageenan. Kappa wha? OK, so maybe not any old kitchen, but certainly that of a molecular gastronomist. Here's a dress made out of, among other things, beef gelatin. Uh, yum?

The 4-minute-plus video above shows how Crane works. In short, she's a lot like a candy maker — mixing, whipping, and stirring together carefully selected ingredients, some chosen for utilitarian reasons (like kappa carrageenan, which gels food), others for their aesthetic value (red food dye, say). Then she spoons the mixtures onto baking tray-like sheets and pops them in a freezer. Later, as the mixtures dehydrate, she molds them around a cling-filmed mannequin, and voila: Micro-Nutrient Couture.

We've seen plenty of edible clothes in our day, and not just at Good Vibrations. What sets Crane's work apart is that it doesn't look like food at all. With its undulating forms and diaphanous texture, it could easily pass for fabric — that is, if not for (we presume) the persistent smell of beef.